Iran and Ukraine: The Illusions of Military Power

 

By David K. Shipler 

            The major wars raging in the Middle East and Europe are teaching a lesson, which will probably go unlearned. Two of the world’s strongest military forces are unable to defeat smaller countries that use asymmetrical warfare—that is, weapons and tactics less advanced than the arsenals they face. The United States and Russia are bogged down by Iran and Ukraine, respectively, whose governments’ continued existence is tantamount to a loss for Washington and Moscow.

            This is an interim assessment to be sure, for wars are judged by their outcomes, which are rarely visible in the short term. Today’s still photograph doesn’t necessarily predict the future. But so far, in failing to realize their ambitions, both Russia and the United States have displayed surprising vulnerabilities. Their armed forces seemed most formidable before they fired the first shot. Once the wars began, their destructive power turned out to be inadequate. The Iranian and Ukrainian governments, facing obliteration, had everything to lose unless they found inventive ways to fight back and survive, which they have done.

The parallel is not a moral one, obviously, for the world would be better without the Iranian regime and worse without a free Ukraine. But war is rarely virtuous, no matter the righteous pleadings of the perpetrators. Nor is the worthiness of a cause a guarantee of success.

            The current cases are especially instructive, because they are the product of two main errors made by both Russia and the US: unrealistic objectives and autocratic decision-making.

The ambitious goal for Vladimir Putin of Russia was to annihilate Ukraine’s national independence and distinctive culture. He spelled out his rationale in a long essay in July 2021, seven months before he invaded, when he wrote that Russia and Ukraine were not separate but occupied “one historical and spiritual space.” As a dictator, he had insulated himself from dissent by creating a bubble of sycophants in the Kremlin. Nor did he consult his citizens about going to war.

The ambitious goal for Donald Trump (and his Israeli partners) was to demolish Iran’s military and replace its Islamic government with one amenable to foregoing nuclear weapons. Among his shifting demands, after the war grew frustrating, came his threat of genocide as he declared last April that unless Iran capitulated, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As an aspiring dictator, he had also insulated himself from dissent by creating a bubble of sycophants—in the White House. Nor did he consult his citizens—or even Congress, as the Constitution requires—about going to war.

Looking for a War

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            The man who craves a Nobel Peace Prize is looking for ways to play with his soldiers. He declares great swaths of the American citizenry the enemy from within and sends befuddled National Guard troops into cities governed by his political opposition. He threatens to go "guns-a-blazing" into Nigeria to stop murders of Christians. He labels occupants of small boats “terrorists” when he imagines, with no proof, that they they might be transporting drugs. He launches a military buildup led by the largest US aircraft carrier to waters near Venezuela in preparation for a possible military assault to overturn the government of the socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.

            This is Donald Trump the peacemaker who did manage to get a shaky end to Israel’s war in Gaza, but who blustered ineffectually about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine and renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. And this is Donald Trump the strongman who undermines his military’s combat expertise by letting his defective “War Secretary,” Pete Hegseth, purge the senior ranks of the most competent officers, a likely step toward politicizing the armed forces with right-wing, white Christian nationalists.

            If this array of odd behavior appears contradictory and hypocritical, let’s look again. It contains significant consistencies of personality and method.

            President Trump thrives on conflict and confrontation, as if his brain chemistry needed the fix. He enhances his power by tough-guy unpredictability, trying for fear, flattery, and capitulation in both warmaking and peacemaking scenarios. This sometimes succeeds, but not always.

If no conflict or crisis exists, he creates or imagines one, then reimagines it as disappearing because of his bold acts. He’s already practices this sleight of hand by thanking himself for restoring order in US cities where no disorder prevailed, and by curtailing drug smuggling via routes where it barely existed. Sadly, his pattern of imagining and reimagining is not just a frivolous magician’s act. It hurts and kills people.

The Risks and Benefits of Government

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In his acerbic 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine skewered the British monarchy with a broad assault: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices.” Government was a necessary evil, he thought, “a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.”

            Moral virtue vs. imperious oppression: that was Paine’s picture. Yet those opposite poles of the human personality represent not just a conflict between society and government but within government itself, especially in the modern era.

On the one hand, as President Trump is demonstrating, government can be a cruel enforcer of political and social conformity, with punishment for dissident speech and policy differences reaching into the distant reaches of civil society.  But government can also act as a facilitator of the common good, mobilizing resources to channel society’s generosity and vision, with protection for the economically vulnerable and stewardship of research in vast fields of science, engineering, education, and beyond.

It is precisely that second, beneficial dimension of government that is being dismantled by Trump, his aides, his Republican members of Congress, and his like-minded Supreme Court justices. What remains, enhanced, is the most threatening facet of government, its absolutist power to frighten, arrest, deport, and close down space for the intricate play of ideas and debate.

In crisis, ironically, the modern society turns to government, either to blame for failure or to beseach for help, as in the aftermath of the Texas floods that swept away girls in a riverside summer camp. Rescues and searches were done by many volunteers, yes, but calls for future preventive measures were directed at government, not at private enterprise. It is government that has the power to pool and direct funds, and thereby amplify the caring of the community. Good government harmonizes with people’s needs.

Trump’s government, however, is hostile to people’s needs, both immediate and long-term. He cuts funds for rescue and repair emergencies such as the Texas flood. He cuts Medicaid funding for the poor, which will also jeoparize health care for the rural non-poor, whose hospitals will struggle to survive without the government aid. He cuts food subsidies for low-income children whose malnutrition will cause lifelong cognitive impairment.

He ends funding and thereby hobbles America’s advantage over China in alternative energy and other fields. He yields his country’s lead in medical advances to others and frightens talented foreign researchers away. He forfeits his country’s affluent compassion in addressing famine, conflict, health crises, and other suffering abroad, thereby diminishing American global influence. He disrupts the future prosperity of the United States, its credit rating, and the strength of its currency by toying impulsively with tarriffs, robbing the intricate worldwide trade mechanisms of predictability, that essential prerequisite for economic investment.

What he leaves intact are the worst elements of government: its totalitarian impulses, its arbitrariness, and its bullying penchant for political oppression: Watch, the ground is being laid for Democratic candidates to be arrested on trumped-up charges, as in Turkey and other semi-authoritarian systems.

Remarkably, little is being done to preserve the genius of the Framers’ constitutional system—its separation of powers—which is being abandoned by the legislative and judicial branches (at the Supreme Court level), leaving Trump’s executive with exorbitant authority to ride roughshod over the checks and balances that have kept American democracy functioning for more than two centuries. That makes the Trumpists and his acolytes in Congress and the Supreme Court anything but “conservative.” They are not conserving. They are regressionists, not revolutionaries in Thomas Paine’s meaning. In 1776, they would have been British loyalists, monarchists. They are staging a counter-revolution, and the country is letting them get away with it.

Perhaps understandably, most Americans have been slow to recognize what is happening.  Comparing the early days of Trump with the early days of Vladimir Putin, a Russian told an American friend several few months ago, “You guys are caving faster than we did.” That was probably because the Russians knew what was coming; they’d been there. Americans do not. They do not yet know how terrifying government can be. Immigrants are learning. Citizens are next.

What Trump and his followers are creating fits Thomas Paine’s characteristic of “intolerable” government, in which “our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.” Under Trump and his successive followers, the United States is likely to become less free, less prosperous, less healthy, less safe, less educated, less just, less stable, less influential, less admired, less connected with the world, and less happy and comfortable for Americans’ children and grandchildren.  

To invert Paine’s dictum, Trump’s government has become an instrument of our vices, not a restraint. It represents society’s worst impulses, which coexist with its generous decency. The question going forward is whether American society, by “uniting our affections,” can someday remake government into a collective effort of virtue that reflects whatever caring resides in the civic culture of the country.